The proliferation of cellular phone technology worldwide today and the resulting convenience this service offers means that personal mobile telephones are rapidly becoming one of the most prevalent personal appliances carried by consumers. At the same time, digital cameras and digital photography have improved in quality and are also becoming more popular. Given this situation, it is inevitable that devices which combine telecommunications and digital image capture will begin to appear in the marketplace. The mobile telephone user will appreciate that since he or she is already carrying the cellular phone almost everywhere, the addition of digital capture capability offers the added convenience of the ability to make photographs essentially whenever the opportunity arises. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,893,037 issued to Reele, et. al. discloses a hybrid digital capture and film camera combined with cellular telephone functionality.
One problem with digital cameras is that they have a finite capacity for storage of digital data so that, for example when the removable memory device of the camera is full, at least some of the images must be transferred to other types of storage such as to a personal computer before additional images can be captured. A means to address the problem of freeing up the memory of the digital camera would be to wirelessly transfer the images to a central depository, and in fact, the device disclosed in the '037 patent has the capability to transfer digital data using a cellular telephone. In addition, U.S. Pat. No. 5,666,159, issued to Parulski, discloses a digital camera which also has an integral cellular transceiver for the purpose of transmitting digital data to a central location. Such a transfer of image data by either the '037 or '159 devices could even be carried out automatically during off-peak hours, perhaps at a reduced charge rate. The co-pending and commonly assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/569,170, by Fredlund, discloses an appliance which can be used to perform such an automatic off-peak rate transfer of digital images, albeit not wirelessly, but instead using standard telephone lines.
With such an image capture and transfer system, a particularly serious problem of image management arises. The convenience of having a digital capture device conveniently at hand much of the time and which always has memory capacity available and is ready for capture will lead to the taking of many more photographs than with previous cameras. A means to effectively periodically manage these images is required and the present invention addresses this problem of image management.